Manipulate
_I: Yesterday's message made me understand several things, but among all of this, two fundamental ideas became clear to me: 1) the first is that we tend to become what we deny due to polarity. 2) And the second is that the concepts we have of things are not the truth, but perceptions according to the facts or links that we have created with the concept to be discussed. That is to say, in the first case, I saw that denying religion, for example, makes us look for a new dogma to follow to judge the previous one. Basically if I take the side of science in judging religion, I am turning science into my new dogma, which is criticizable for using the same methods of judgment. In the second case, it implies that the idea of religion did not arise to oppress minds, but to unite them and give them a voice in a network. The negative concept we have today of a religion is due to the events that its individuals have carried out throughout history. Under this argument we could say that all science is bad because it is science that created the atomic bomb.
_AM: Everything we see in our lives are only emotional and sentimental perspectives, the filters of being, contemplating realities. Your nature is to prejudge, since everything that comes to you is filtered by your experience and knowledge of things. This is what generates so many battles in the world, most of them unnecessary and absurd, that separate men from women, whites from blacks, left and right, heaven and hell, religion and science. And so many others. The only truth is that you are all everything, and you cannot escape any of the opposites. Like a magnet, the more you try to move away from the opposing force, the harder you will collapse when faced with it. No matter how much you deny your opposite, it will return to you in one way or another, and the crisis will occur when you see that you have become what you judged. Prejudice is a useful tool in the process of adaptation to the environment, but useless in the process of awareness or the search for coherence.
_I: In what sense?
_AM: For example, let's take fire. In a first encounter with fire, it amazes you, because it is amazing, it gives heat, light, generates colors, consumes things. But it surprises you until you burn. The moment you touched the fire and your nervous system immediately interprets that that beautiful element generates pain, what it does is place a judgment on it. Judgment comes from the Latin “iudis”, which means “to indicate”. In a way, the concept says that placing a judgment on something is basically labeling it and indicating what category it belongs to. Thus, in your future, you will no longer need to get burned again when you see fire, you will understand that whether it is an ember, a flame, a fire, a candle, a spark, a bonfire or a grill, your brain will tell you in advance the possible results. painful to touch. Indicating in advance is called “pre-judgment”.
_I: Now I understand why prejudices are useful, then. But what about the prejudices that we say we have to eliminate?
_AM: Fire burns, but it also cooks. It helps boil water to kill microbes and bacteria in it. It keeps you warm in the winter. Reduces the remains of a harvest. Heat the bathroom for a good shower. It gives light on a dark, moonless night. Stops the spread of diseases through cremation. It allows you to melt elements, create tools, and do alchemy and medicine. Fire not only burns and produces pain, but also many other benefits. When humans discovered fire, they began to cook meat and other foods. Stopping eating raw foods generated a chemical reaction that improved the connectivity of the brain's neurotransmitters, making humans become homo sapiens-sapiens, intelligent beings. Imagine if because of the prejudice of “fire burns, never touch it”, no one would have ever cooked. Today they would continue to coexist with Neanderthals in huts and caves.
_I: I understand... Prejudice helps us identify, but it limits us in experimentation.
_AM: Believing that a culture is bad deprives us of cultural expansion, the enrichment of thoughts and ideas. Racism prevents the improvement of the species, because the greater the mix of genes, the more adaptable we become to all climates and terrain, as well as expanding our intellectual capacities. All prejudices help you identify the world so that you do not have to start from scratch every day, allowing you to have prior baggage with which to face reality, just as having learned the letters helps you read any text. But if you think that only your letters are the good ones, your world will be reduced to the languages that write with your alphabet, depriving you of the enrichment of other countries, cultures and knowledge.
_I: The same thing that makes us be and understand the world is what limits us and distances us from it.
_AM: The paradox of existence. The same thing that preserves your life and integrity is what prevents you from living your life for fear of losing said integrity. But this mechanism works only at the level of unconsciousness, because when you turn to the world of consciousness, prejudice becomes an indicator as such, but not a limitation. No one is free from prejudices, but you can use them freely.
_I: In what way?
_AM: When you talk about generalities, for example. Phrases like “white people are like this”, “Chinese people are this way”, “black people do it this way”, “Christians are like this”, “Muslims are this other way”… They all tend to use generalities. They are prejudices, which group together concepts. And they are not wrong, they help to conceptualize, to understand qualities and defects of a collective mind. When you talk about a specific history, or a geography, they have shaped the psyche of a people, language, culture, religion, and you can understand many people through general concepts, which helps you understand from prejudice what you can take or leave them. What is useful to you, and where you can value its qualities. The negative aspect lies in classifying everyone as equal, without allowing the idea that each individual in the group, in turn, has singularities. The concept of Individual passed to that of Family, and from Family it has passed to People, from People to Culture, from Culture to Nation and from Nation to Race, and from Race to Species. Which means that the individual, without finding his own potential, his ability to be who he really is, relegates his power to the closest group. And the family, that group, for fear of feeling displaced, relegates power to a larger group of families called the People. And thus the generalities are generated that give rise to the great preconceptions and prejudices of history. Thus, after generations, it becomes part of the essence, causing individuals to confuse themselves as simple extremities of the group, imitating their actions. And no matter how much I distance myself or deny my group and decide to naturally withdraw within myself, my nervous system continues to seek harmony through what it knows, and because of this, we end up living in similar groups or patterns.
_I: It's the typical thing they say: that no matter how far you run away from your problems, they will follow you, because they were always inside you.
_AM: Exactly, because it is cellular information anchored in the central nervous system. For this reason, people who seek freedom feel imprisoned everywhere they go, and the more they open their eyes, the more they realize that the system is the same, and they feel imprisoned in it, calling it “the Matrix”. Because they feel trapped in prejudices, because what they see of the world is through emotional filters. Pay attention and you will see that Native Americans throughout America, especially the people of the jungles and steppes, did not know the concept of freedom, simply because they did not conceive the concept of slavery. Thus, freedom is a natural state, not something that must be earned. The same thing happens with work: for the Amerindian peoples, there was no notion of work as in the European world, therefore, there was no concept of earning bread with sweat, or suffering to be successful, because they knew that Mother Nature gave them everything, and they always had what they needed if they knew how to observe and live in harmony with the environment. On the other hand, Europeans always had to fight for the few resources generated in the few summer months in limited territories, which meant that earning one's bread was an effort, a battle against the climate and enemies. Effort and work are concepts of slavery, in which the servants were threatened with a whip with 3 sticks at the ends, with which they received punishment if there was no effort. Tres Palos became the Latin word “Tri Palium”, origin of the word work. Clearly different in the Saxon languages, it comes from the word Wyrcan meaning “to act, to fulfill, to do”. Even so, the Latin concept has been transferred, through the Christian religion, to the entire world by colonialism, and the Protestant concepts of hard work have been manifested in the capitalist vision of economic culture since the Industrial Revolution, as well as in the Christian sects such as “God's Work” (Opus Dei). If you put a European in front of a Native American, the European will think that the native is lazy and lazy waiting for things to come to him by magic, while the native will think of the European that he is an ambitious egoist who believes that in order to live you have to suffer. Both preconceptions and prejudices have been created through the personal and cultural contexts and experiences of each group. Now… Which one is right?
_I: None, I guess...
_AM: Yes, none. And at the same time, they are both right. That is to say, there is no right way to do things. Everyone will agree on one thing: the Earth gives us, and with what it gives us, we do. And that is precisely another of those evolutionary processes that has made us who we are. They are our hands. The hands of the hominid have given the ability to create things, shape tools, but above all, in humans, they have also allowed them to shape intangible ideas. While hominids take a stick and a stone and with their hands shape them into tools to dig, obtain roots, grind grain, or do hundreds of other useful daily actions to survive, humans have managed to create a pencil. , a brush and chisel, and thus design art, poetry, science. This is when you discover the concept of “Using your hands to create”, something you know in Latin as “Manipulate”. And this is the concept I wanted to get to. Evolutionarily the hominid developed hands to manipulate his environment, and when thanks to fire he developed his mind, he realized that he could manipulate ideas too.
_I: This is where the prejudice or preconception we have of the word Manipulation comes from, applied to governments, religions, philosophies, spirituality, cultures, and so many others...
_AM: Manipulating is seen today as the way to control groups and individuals. Those groups we talked about, over which the individual relegated power to him, are easy to manipulate in ideas. And the reason is simple: it is easier to shape an idea for a group of thousands of people who share the same prejudice than for thousands of individuals with different preconceptions. For this reason, it is easier to create a weak, repetitive education, based on memorization and competition, than to generate an education of creatives and free thinkers. Thousands know how to manipulate materials, few know how to manipulate minds. But we all know how to manipulate the same thing...
_I: What?
_AM: Emotions. Manipulation is fundamentally emotional. Therefore you are controlled by fear, hunger, needs, sex and love. Emotions are the basic energy of action, the creative fuel of the personal power of the being. If you lose the ability to connect with yourself, you will not know the power you have in you, and you will waste energy, ceasing to be creative and becoming an automaton. You relegate the energetic power to the automatism of the group, you become irresponsible for yourself, and you hand over the responsibility to another, be it a leader, boss, guide, politician, savior, etc. By not manipulating your own energy, it moves with the current, and becomes manipulated by someone external. So, at that moment, an evolutionary mechanism becomes a limitation, and becomes a manipulation system.
_I: And so we all manipulate…
_AM: Oh yeah, sure. The creative capacity is due to the energetic power of the Sacred. There, in your vitality-gestating womb, is the key that allows you to manifest (from the Latin “to have a party with your hands”), and therefore, the hands manipulate your inner power to translate your ideas into matter. But sometimes, we don't have that energy, and we look for it in the emotional and sentimental ties we have with others. There, what you do is become a parasite, a bacteria or virus, which uses the other's energy as if it were clay, manipulating their being.
_I: It's horrible to realize this.
_AM: But necessary. Before you dismantle the Manipulation of an entire system of planetary prejudice and control, you must dismantle it in your own inner world. Don't you think that acting from there is much more coherent?
_I: Yes, of course, obviously. To judge the manipulation of external systems without recognizing that one also does it in their daily lives with those closest to them is hypocritical.
_AM: When we talked about you denying religion because of its manipulation... Do you now understand how said manipulation was achieved?
_I: Yes, I understand, and therefore I understand that it is not religion, or science, or a government, but the group of individuals who have made it systemic to relegate power in the group for fear of being rejected.
_AM: This is why today's task is to write your own Emotional Manipulations. The question is “How and who do you emotionally manipulate in your life?” This question implicitly implies the idea that manipulation seeks to use the energy or capacity of the other in order to achieve an end of one's own need that I cannot satisfy myself. The manipulations can be of all kinds...
_I: …From saying phrases like “Would you hand me that thing on the table, please?”, but with a tone of pity, sadness or condescension, to “No one will love you more than me!”, which can create a insecurity in the other to believe that it is impossible to feel loved by others. And many other worse examples that I can't even think of...
_AM: The Sacred is the creation. To create you need your hands; The human evolved the mind, and therefore can manifest ideas creatively. This allows him to manipulate reality according to his prejudices, and from there he can control the environment by manipulating it to his needs and whims. When I don't know how to manipulate my own inner strength, I will let others manipulate it. Whether victim or perpetrator, manipulation will always be emotional. When you seek to be free from this circuit, you will recognize the manipulation of the system, and in order to free yourself you must take personal power again, which will inevitably lead you to confront your own manipulations. Ask yourself the question, question yourself, write down every manipulation that you recognize in yourself.
_I: I can write in one column the manipulations that others have placed on me, and in another column the manipulations that I have placed on others...
_AM: Yes. Exactly. And above all, be able to manipulate your own strength again.
_I: I manipulate my own energy, I am my own creator.